Let me happily welcome you all to this fourth edition of Kerala Literature Festival put together by the DC Kizhakkemuri Foundation, Kottayam with support from several sponsors whom we would like to thank profusely at the very outset. The growth the Festival has achieved in just three years has been phenomenal, both in terms of the range and quality of its content and the number of participants as well as of the audience. This would have been impossible but for the increasing number of willing collaborators, the generous cooperation of writers and thinkers from India and abroad and an audience eager to meet the litterateurs and public intellectuals they admire. No wonder KLF is now celebrated as the second largest literary event in Asia, a real people’s festival, the footfall last year touching one hundred and fifty thousand.

This edition comes with many special features. One central theme running through the deliberations at the Festival is Diversity that we believe is central to any idea of real democracy, especially in the Indian context of cultural standardisation sought by hegemonic forces. KLF is conceived as an open platform for dialogue, dissent and discussion, the spaces for which seem to have been shrinking over the years. It is also space for the Malayalam writers of three generations to meet and debate issues and evaluate the recent transformations in idiom and sensibility. It enables writers and thinkers in Kerala to interact with their coevals in other parts of India and abroad. This time we are showcasing Welsh literature, with writers of various genres from Wales reading, talking and discussing their writing in the specific cultural context. Besides we have too writers and scholars from many countries in Asia, America and Europe like Sri Lanka, Spain, Sweden, Belgium and Czech Republic and the U S A. Then there is a whole contingent of writers, intellectuals and activists from different parts of India that includes among others, Ramchandra Guha who delivers the keynote address, Arundhati Roy, Harsh Mander, Swami Agnivesh, Shashi Tharoor, Jeet Tayil, P. Sainath, Miki Desai, Anita Nair, Karan Thapar, Keki Daruwalla, Devdutt Patnaik, Manu S Pillai and several others and the best of poets, fiction writers, historians, political thinkers, artists, cartoonists, critics, translators, social activists, filmmakers, actors, legal experts, media experts and journalists of three generations from Kerala . There too some noted Indian scientists discussing contemporary science

From this year on, we are launching a new series on Indian literature. We will open this with a wide-ranging discussion of issues in Indian literature. The focus –language this time is Marathi, represented by twelve of the best Marathi writers including playwrights, poets, novelists, critics and prose writers. We have four Jnanpith winning writers from India, Sitakant Mahapatra( Oriya), Pratibha Ray ( Odiya), Bhalchandra Nemade ( Marathi) and M T Vasudevan Nair ( Malayalam ). There is too a special regional focus on the North East, represented by five writers from different states. We have also some writers from Kannada and Hindi.

Another speciality is a three-day workshop for translating poetry assisted by ‘Literature Across Frontiers’ the products of which will be presented in the festival.

We also have a special venue for a parallel, theme-based film festival curated by Bina Paul where films by women across the world will be screened and discussed besides cultural programmes every evening by Indian and foreign artists and musicians. A book- fair will also accompany the literary festival.

Let us celebrate our cultural diversity that militates against any monolithic idea of the nation, interrogate set notions in aesthetics and politics and uphold the value of art and literature in a dark time of declared and undeclared proscriptions and censorships.